I am going to Bulgaria! It has been more than three years since I was there, and I am really looking forward to see Sasha and to be there and see everybody else.

I will be reachable by e-mail (my hotmail address is the best), but I won't read it very often. For urgents matters you should contact my parents. Jelly is staying in our house for a while.

Our plans in Bulgaria are not very specific yet, but we'll first go to Perushtitsa, where Sasha's family lives.

My flight is through Vienna. I'm leaving at 10:30, and if everything goes well I'll be in Sofia around 16:15 o'clock. That's local time -- the time in Bulgaria is one hour ahead of Dutch time.

Wow... the preparations took much longer than I thought. At least I'm ready now, all the luggage is packed.

Tomorrow I'll wake up at 7:15 o'clock, leave the house at 8:15 so I'll be at Schiphol around 9:15.

Friday I'll go to Bulgaria!

In the afternoon I went into the city for a few hours. I needed some extra things, such as warm shoes and gloves -- it's pretty cold now there.

The shopping went quite well, and I'm sort of ready, except for some smaller things that I'll arrange tomorrow.

Yesterday evening I've been experimenting with a graphical tool again; this time with a different subject.

See the result here, or here in a larger format. What do you think?

Nice: a baby princess was born yesterday.

I traveled back from Middenmeer this morning, so I had time to look at the newspapers. There were many advertisements related to the royal baby. The thing I liked the best was the 10% discount offered by the coffee vendor at the station because of the birth.

Yesterday evening we celebrated Sinterklaas at my parents, which was very nice.

Some nice news today: my uncle Peter successfully finished his study.

He has been studying part-time in the last years and now he'll have a Master of Business Administration degree. His official graduation will be in January. Congratulations!

I'm in Middenmeer now, it's Sinterklaas weekend and we'll celebrate it tomorrow evening.

I spent the whole afternoon shopping. I saw almost every shoe-shop in the center of Haarlem, without result though. I did find a travel-bag, which is useful for my journey to Bulgaria next week, but also for smaller trips, such as to my parents or to Groningen.

Today I spent about six hours in the train! I went to Groningen today, there was a little thing to be fixed. Things went smooth, and we were done around 16:30 o'clock.

I was prepared to stay a night in Groningen, in case I had to work there tomorrow too. Somehow it was a bit of a disappointment that I didn't have a reason to stay there tonight. At the other hand: it's nice to be home. And... this way I could restart my server. Somewhere around 14:00 o'clock the website didn't work anymore. There has probably been a small power-outage this afternoon; some other things were shut down as well.

Funny: today we changed only around ten lines of code, which was done in an hour. However, it took us a whole day to test it thoroughly, wrap it up and put it on the real server.

I just got a confirmation that I'll go to Groningen tomorrow for Chess. There's some work to be done there, probably for one or two days.

It means of course a long train journey; almost three hours.

Today I was at a customer of Chess in Utrecht. We were testing some of the software that I wrote in the last weeks. It's exciting to see if the program does the things it should do, and to verify it doesn't crash when something unexpected happens.

It worked out quite well. In the beginning there were some trivial things that needed to be adjusted, but we were very satisfied with the final results.